Mike's been a great guy here on channel 9. I hope he finds a great new career.

From his blog:

"After 11½ years at one of the greatest companies in the world, I've decided to leave Microsoft and rejuvenate my entrepreneurial spirit. My last day in the office is Friday, September 30, 2011.

Thank you for subscribing to, reading, commenting, and e-mailing me about what I've written over the past 8 years. I've thoroughly enjoyed "talking" to all of you, albeit in virtual form. It's kept me grounded and in-touch, and your feedback has helped shape a lot of decisions at the company, especially those related to our PDC and MIX conferences.

Over the past 8 years, I've written 392 posts. You've left 3,227 public comments (I didn't track the number of private e-mails, but it's a lot). And according to our blogging platform, you've contributed to 10,273,373 total views. Wow!

I've setup a new personal blog at http://blog.mikeswanson.com, if you'd like to follow along. Or, you can see what I'm up to as @Anyware on Twitter. Either way, I hope that you keep in touch.

Take care, remember to take big, bold bets, and whatever you do, improve the world!"

Sounds like MS moves too slowly to keep up with the market these days. While I don't agree with the super fast version changes a la Chrome and Firefox, MS does need to ramp it up a bit to stay relevant. The big thing I'm afraid of is that by the time MS gets W8 out the door next year, Apple and Google will have taken most of the good ideas and put them into their own products.

OSX gets an update every two years. iOS gets an update every year. Android gets an update about every six months. MS can't compete if Windows gets an update every three years and WP7 gets an update every year-and-a-half.

MS Research cranks out some really cool ideas. I'd rather they develop all of them into products and "see what sticks" rather than have a lengthy process that brings some of them to market years later.

@spivonious:To some extent that's what they did do with WPF -> Silverlight -> WinRT, but the problem is you just can't throw out platforms that others rely on and hope they stick. It's why Google Wave was such a failure, not because it technically didn't work, but simply because nobody had any faith they'd keep it around long enough to be worth investing in and the lack of interest soon saw it killed off, a self fulfilling prophecy.

Despite their many failings at times, Microsoft have always been the most reliable when it comes to producing a platform you can expect to stick around. It's not always quite as exciting as others, not always the big shiny but it's always a heck of a lot less of a gamble.

That was a good read on death of silverlight. So I guess Silverlight is dead until Microsoft realizes they screwed up. Based on past history it will take a few years. Hopefully Windows phone will move up and drag silverlight along with it. Microsoft will eventually find the right way (need Bill G back). Don't think that Apple and Google are immune to big corporate infighting and poor decisions either. It is frustrating that they think HTML5 /JavaScript is the solution for application development. I understand boring Metro UI on a phone due to real estate issues but on a laptop or tablet we cannot get some eye candy. Seems backwards too.

OSX gets an update every two years. iOS gets an update every year. Android gets an update about every six months. MS can't compete if Windows gets an update every three years and WP7 gets an update every year-and-a-half.

*snip*

What was so innovative about the last two major Android updates? Flash support? NFC support? BFD. Unless the device makers decide to start putting in some newfangled sensor or input device, about the only things to look forward to are performance improvements and better application integration. Even now Android STILL doesn't have a media player worth a plug nickel.

I don't think silverlight is dead. It's just happen not usable in W8 Metro. And .Net isn't shutout of the W8M either. The article is just interesting to me cuz of the petty personalities in software evangelism. Which isn't very different than religious evangeism

We will really miss Mike. His work ethic, brilliance, creativity and productivity represent a big loss for us. That said, he will be successful in whatever path he takes and I know he'll not completely abandon our platform - he'll push the envelope and build great apps. Mike leaves on the best possible note and we salute him.

Best of luck, Mike. It's been a real pleasure working with you. I'll personally miss our hallway conversations which were always enlightening, technically compelling and fun.

We will really miss Mike. His work ethic, brilliance, creativity and productivity represent a big loss for us. That said, he will be successful in whatever path he takes and I know he'll not completely abandon our platform - he'll push the envelope and build great apps.

*snip*

It doesn't sound like he's abandoning the Microsoft platform at all. It sounds more like he's going "all in" on Metro style applications because he perceives that that's the direction Microsoft is pushing its devs.

If Windows 8 is to be the future of Microsoft, * it, I dislike it initiallybut I'm in. If I have to design my way out of this crappy world of experience, so be it.I'm going to now spend majority of my energy in evangelizing metro principles and start teaching people more of what I know? As I seem to have a niche here and its worthwhile showing others the total amount of my knowledge and seeing what comes of that?

His blog post was a good read, but his writing would be far more coherent if he didn't litter his sentences with unnecessary question marks.

Funny i spoke with John Papa just after a presentation and asked him about the silverlight / wpf collision i saw comming ..... I do get the feel that MSFT has been way to "reactive" to stuff and that's a bad way to run a large corp IMHO. Sure you have to "react" to stuff but you also need a real game plan and find the way to be stable and somewhat "Proactive" and not spend all day thrashing around wasting resources.

Thank you for all of the kind words! I always enjoyed working with the Channel 9 team on my videos, including the Countdown shows that I did with Jennifer for our MIX and PDC events. I'm not going far...I'm saying in the Seattle area, and I'm sure I'll run into many of you at future events.

@figuerres, @DeathByVisualStudio, etc..: I don't understand why this conversation is happening on this thread. Please create a different one for this hogwash. This thread is about Mike Swanson, not some disgruntled ex-employee with an axe to grind....

@cbae:It does not work on my machine, it works in the classic desktop but it does nothing in Metro (regular desktop with no touch devices).

The blogger complained about there being no keyboard shortcut and decided the best solution was to use the command line, which drops you into the classic desktop anyway. All he had to do was select the Desktop tile and press ALT+F4.